Creating news tiles with SAP HANA UI Integration Services (UIS)

Intro

Hi everyone, in this post I want to share with you some experiences about how to create news tiles with SAP HANA UI Integration Services (UIS). I installed SAP HANA SPS09 three months ago and have already tried lots of cool new features. Today I wanted to test something with UIS in SAP HANA Stuido. So when I created the “UIS Catalog” artifact and added a tile, I found there’s also something new with UIS in SAP HANA SPS09.

As of SAP HANA SPS08, there’s no news tile template in UIS. But as you can see in the following screenshot, in SAP HANA SPS09 now we have the news tile template which means we are able to place news tiles in the Fiori Launchpad in just few seconds. That’s cool! “Custom App Launcher” is also newly introduced in SAP HANA SPS09, but I’m not going to focus on that in this blog post. Maybe I will show you something in another blog post.

What’s UIS? & Some useful materials

As usual, first of all I wanted to show you some basics and useful materials about this topic, since perhaps for someone it’s the first time to hear SAP HANA UI Integration Services (UIS) and I didn’t plan to introduce everything in this post. So, what’s UIS? I think the following slide page explained this clearly. As of SAP HANA SPS09, I think the killer feature is the capability of creating Fiori Launchpad inside SAP HANA.

Creating our first news tile

As its name implies, we can use news tile to display news feeds or we say RSS. In this section, let’s start to create our first news tile and show it on our Fiori Launchpad step by step. I’m using SAP HANA SPS09 Rev. 93.

Step 1: Create XS project, as of SAP HANA SPS09, you can create .xsapp and .xsaccess together with creating the project.

That’s it! No coding, only configurations, you got the Fiori Launchpad with your customized News Tile. Want to have more RSS feeds on SCN? You can have a look at Everything I know about… SCN RSS Feeds and configure your own.

Failed to start the app…

However, it seems to be an error when clicking the news tile. I found SAP Note 1968559 and 2065811 are related with this issue but don’t know yet how to solve this inside SAP HANA. 🙁

To make the app work, and display the info, simply create a target mapping with the following details:Semantic Object: NewsFeedAction:displayNewsListLaunchpad Role: SPBUTILLaunchpad Instance: NEWSITEMApplication Alias: NewsAppThe Semantic Object, Launchpad Role etc. should be already available in the system.

The result should be a list like this: redirecting you to the article when clicked.

I am attempting to implement a custom app launcher tile, but I have found that unless I give a user the SITE_DESIGNER role (as you explain) they cannot select from any of my custom catalog tiles. I don’t want to give all my HANA users this role. Similarly, if I assign the catalog/app site privileges directly to the user, they are still unable to see the tiles in their tile catalog. If I then give them the SITE_DESIGNER role they can see my custom tiles, and every other catalog tile in my system. What’s going on here? Why can’t I simply make certain tiles available to users?